It seems that students across the country are complaining about the rising cost of textbooks. However, we believe that students who buy and sell their books online can pay less for their books than ever before. There is more and more competition with companies who want to buy those used books. The competition is so fierce, in fact, that you can often sell a book back for almost as much as you paid for it. We’d like to gather some data from real students who are currently in college. If you are a student, or know a student, please submit the following:

The following sites were the most popular in May and June 2010 according to the number of visitors sent from BookScouter. This is a good indication of which websites offered the highest prices during the month.

I had previously been running the mobile site and the iPhone application off of an older server. That server had some problems yesterday and the mobile site was down for some period of time until I got that fixed this morning. I have had plans to move those pieces over to the newer servers, but the problems from yesterday gave it the urgency needed to get that done. The good news is that the mobile site and iPhone apps now use the same infrastructure as the main websites which is more scalable and reliable. Additionally, some of the newer vendors which weren’t available on those platforms are now available as well.
I apologize for the inconvenience caused by those being inaccessible, but they should be working well now along with some other fixes that have been planned as well.

This is probably the busiest week of the year for this site. BookScouter traffic has more than tripled since last year at this time. Last week I added an extra server to give the site some more capacity. I’m happy that all of the servers have been performing well! The problem now is all of the websites whose prices this site is searching are also getting stressed. It is their busiest time of the year as well, and some of them aren’t handling the added volume as well as others. That means that sometimes when BookScouter tries to look up prices on their sites, it goes really slowly. That in-turn causes prices to show up slower on BookScouter. I’ve tried to account for slow sites, and in general it does a good job, but I’m occasionally seeing issues where it still goes slowly. I’m investigating those more closely to see if I can prevent the cases that are still getting through.